Friday, February 14, 2014

Letter to a High School Guidance Counselor, Upon Her Retirement

Dear Ms. Woodyard,

Hearing your name makes me fifteen years old again, at
the very best moment of fifteen. Not the fifteen when one is lost – which is so
much of life at fourteen and fifteen and eighteen and twenty-one and twenty-five,
longer than any of us would like to admit – but the fifteen of SDS, the fifteen
when one is called into the office of Jo Woodyard.

So you’re in there and the winter light is coming
through the windows and you’re a little scared because you know she’s going to
talk to you about the future, which feels ungraspable, which likely will entail
college in some strange place, a school occupied by those older SDS alums who
come back to give talks about where they are now, leaning on desks or sitting
on desks and seeming cocky and wise with the secrets of academia. They have
girlfriends and boyfriends and they drink and do internships and they no longer live with their parents, which
frankly blows your mind. But anyway,
forget that. Focus.

Jo Woodyard is standing across from you, ready to
talk about The Future. What schools? What plans? Do you want to be a big fish
in a little pond, or a little fish in a big pond? She asks you this, and you
realize you have never really thought of yourself as a fish before, but now that
you think of it, there are a lot of options. Probably you wouldn’t want to be a
goldfish in one of those koi ponds, all burnished in glittery scales with no
place to go. Maybe you’re one of those bottom dwellers, those nurse sharks with
the crazy, wiry mustaches, cruising the sea floor, or a rare pink dolphin in
the Amazon, making do in cloudy waters with very little, only showing your
beauty to discerning eyes. Come on, cut it out. Focus. Jo Woodyardhas advice.

Jo Woodyard seems serious and grave and invested in
you when, truth is, you’re not really
invested in you. Your whole life only seems to consist of now, with your
friends, when you laugh so hard it really does feel like you’ve ruptured
something deep inside, one of those superfluous organs like the spleen or a
spare kidney. Your whole life is listening to Enya and crying under your
bedspread. Sneaking out of Mike Johnson’s philosophy class to watch movies at
Converse Cinemas. Pretending you know what’s what because you’ve had your first
coffee, your first cigarette, because you’ve read poetry in a room with people
who didn’t laugh you out of the joint. If there is a future out there, it’s too
far away for you to see, and probably, you have always thought, you just have
to age yourself into it, like how wisdom teeth grow without any of your own
doing, because of some wide-mouthed, prognathous cave man ancestor – no offense
to him. The future, you have always thought, happens by accident.

And anyway, Flip and Heather and Meagan are waiting
for you in the art room where you, de facto members of the Loser Arty Group, go
to eat lunch. If you do imagine a future, you pray it’s one in which you are
Cool Arty Types living together in a ramshackle house writing poetry, all of
you with Winona Ryder’s hairdo, all of you dating Ethan Hawke. After this is
over with Jo Woodyard, after you figure out whether you’re a nurse shark or a
pink dolphin, you’ll go back in that room and sit on the plastic milk crates
that make a bingo game of your ass cheeks, and Meagan will ask, how did it go? “Did
she suggest that you have a future in the custodial arts?” Flip, who has
memorized the entire class’s GPA from a list he clandestinely read upside down
on Jo Woodyard’s desk, wonders if you want to know your rank. He is eating a
chili dog. You have Lunchables, which you’ll read about in ten years as being
only slightly above pork rinds as the worst possible thing for human
consumption.

How did it go? You say it was fine. It went fine.
You don’t tell them about the light in the windows or how you scanned Jo
Woodyard’s bookshelf and her photographs because all adults, especially
teachers, are Fascinating Mysterious Unicorn Creatures. How weird is it when
you run into them outside class at Belk or Hardees and they’re masquerading as
Regular People, people who get oil changes and file taxes and trim their
toenails? It’s all too much. You don’t tell them that Jo Woodyard was serious
about your future, which kind of made you serious about your future, like maybe
it didn’t have to be an accident after all. Maybe writing was something that,
you know, maybe, possibly, could be done.
By, like, you. She didn’t even seem to be kidding. You thought maybe she’d hold
the door to her office as you were leaving and say, psych. Good luck, kid. You’re gonna need it. But Jo Woodyard didn’t.

And so you leave, your head doing that thing where
someone praises you, someone believes in you, and now the whole head is beating
like a heart or a fingertip, that rush of blood, and you want to tell everyone
and no one, keep it a secret, because when you tell too much, when you share
too much, or with the wrong people, it’s like being robbed over the course of
one whole day, a little bit missing every time. And now, see, there is this
thing called The Future, and even if you never figure out whether you’re a
nurse shark or a goldfish or a pink Amazonian dolphin, you know you can be
smart about it. Be brave or fake bravery, at the very least.

Take a bite of that PB&J and look around the SDS
art room one last time. You can’t know this, but about fourteen years after you
graduate – my god, you’ll be ancient!
– you’ll come do a reading, stand up there in a bookstore near that place where
you had your first coffee and read putrid poetry that no one laughed at, that
place that is now a noodle shop, and you’ll be reading from your novel, and
right there in the audience?Jo
Woodyard. The Future is now. Jo
Woodyard is sitting there while you answer questions, most of which are posed
by your mother in the front row who doesn’t realize she is embarrassing you by
publicly vocalizing her abiding desire that they Make Your Book Into A Movie.
Still, all you can think is, Jo Woodyard.

What is she
thinking? You can’t tell now, any better than you could then. You’re not
fifteen. You are thirty-two. Even
Flip probably no longer remembers his class rank. It’s winter-dark, save for
the Christmas lights on Morgan Square. Someone is asking you your best advice
to writers, something you’ve answered a dozen times in the last six months. And
so you say, leaning on that lectern, “be stubborn.” That’s the truth. You were
just stubborn about it. You decided the future wasn’t an accident, or at least,
it didn’t have to be, sometimes. And when she leaves – when you leave, Jo Woodyard – you are walking
out that door when you say the very best thing possible. “I’m glad you were
stubborn.”

I’m glad you were stubborn about the future, Ms.
Woodyard. We all are. And thanks for letting us swim in your pond, big fish.

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Hibernate: Stories

Bone Worship, a Novel

About Me

Elizabeth Eslami is the author of the story collection, Hibernate, for which she was awarded the 2013 Ohio State University Prize in Short Fiction, and the novel Bone Worship (Pegasus, 2010). Her writing has appeared most recently in The Sun and Witness, and her work is featured in the anthologies Tremors: New Fiction By Iranian American Writers and Writing Off Script: Writers on the Influence of Cinema. She is the Hampton and Esther Boswell Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at DePauw University. For more information, please visit her website at www.elizabetheslami.com